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People who are good at reading have different brains: study

158 points by pseudolus 2y ago

i_love_retros 2y ago
But what about someone like myself who is good at reading but doesn't get the same pleasure from it anymore and can no longer finish books?
- imzadi 2y ago
  I was wondering something similar from a different perspective. I love to read, but I'm actually terrible at it. My eyes don't track well and I jump lines constantly, get confused about where I am, and have to start whole pages over sometimes. My mind also wanders, and I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really been reading. It takes me twice as long to finish a book as it does my friends, but I still enjoy reading and love books.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really been reading. You're not alone there.
  - mxuribe 2y ago
    Oh wow, i thought you were describing me for a moment there!
  - feoren 2y ago
    > My mind also wanders, and I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really been reading. I think this is an under-rated benefit of reading. Would you feel like you failed if your mind wandered during a guided meditation? Can reading serve a similar function? This is one reason why I gave up trying to significantly increase my reading speed. Blazing through a nonfiction book at 700 WPM might make you feel like you've learned a lot, but you probably haven't really digested anything. Do you really want to uncritically ingest a nonfiction book? I've listened to enough episodes of If Books Could Kill (amazing podcast, btw) to no longer have any desire to quickly "absorb knowledge" from a book, with how likely it is that that "knowledge" is flawed in myriad ways. I now think it's much better to go slowly, ponder what you read, take time to let your mind wander (it's connecting the rest of your life to what you've just read), and be critical and questioning of everything you read. If a book isn't worth taking this time on, it's not worth reading. And for novels or reading for fun, why would you want to rush through it? It's for pleasure: go at whatever speed gives you the most pleasure. It's not a contest.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Some years ago, I noticed that I read less and less, and it troubled me. Then one day I tried on a pair of reading glasses over my regular glasses. I was amazed. The trouble turned out to be it simply got harder and harder for me to read, and so I enjoyed it less, so read less. Getting progressive lenses fixed that.
  - kbelder 2y ago
    My case exactly, except I'm still in denial.
  - OJFord 2y ago
    Very similar with me - I've never been a huge reader (actually, I wonder in the opening stats how many are people like me humbly saying they 'don't read regularly' because although they absolutely do read a lot more than others it's not as much as they would like) but I noticed it was very fatiguing, I'd often barely read anything before I was yawning or closing/stretching my eyes, wanting to look away. Earlier this year I went to the opticians (it'd been a few years) and lo and behold I had a prescription for the first time. A very mild one, and I suspect it's the astigmatism that affects reading more, since it makes smaller fonts sort of 'fuzzy' around the edges, even though everything seems perfectly fine at that distance (or any other) without the direct comparison.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  Could this be a case of modern screen-based dopamine delivery systems affecting your attention span? From personal experience, I find it much easier to get absorbed reading books like I used to when I'm on a detox from the tyranny of the screen. It doesn't take long at all; a day or two and I start to feel some recovery. Taking even that much time away feels increasingly difficult... But like going to the gym, you rarely regret it afterwards.
erehweb 2y ago
Do we know if this difference is present at birth, or something that shows up as a result of doing more reading, like how the brains of London taxi drivers changed when they studied for the taxi-driving exam, which meant they had to memorize lots of routes.
- citadel_melon 2y ago
  I was thinking of the same example for this article. Nature vs nurture arguments often need much more evidence than many can provide.
  - philipov 2y ago
    Nature vs Nurture arguments always suffer from a reductionism problem by assuming there's a dichotomy between the two, which owes its origin to a feeling of exceptionalism that separates anything Human from anything Natural. In fact, nurture is a subcategory of nature, and there is a complex intertwined relationship between genetic and cultural heredity. Trying to reduce it to a debate between one or the other will poison one's understanding before even getting started.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I know that 4 years of college rewired my brain.
- smeej 2y ago
  The part where it talked about how the brain changes when people practice reading more made the title and first paragraphs seem like they have the causation exactly backward. It sounded like they were saying "people are good at reading because they have different brains," implying some sort of unfair advantage, rather than that people who read a lot develop different regions of their brains than people who don't. I'm surprised by the number of adults I've worked with who had graduate degrees and yet could not read a paragraph out loud on the spot and sound natural. I found out most of the reason I was having so much trouble communicating with them was because almost all our communication was in writing, and they couldn't read fluently. It's hard for me to imagine completing, like, 5th grade without being able to read well, so it's a testament to their fierce determination that they'd been working around that challenge at such high levels!
IAmGraydon 2y ago
When they were surveying readers vs non-readers, does the reading have to occur via books? Does reading text on the internet not count as reading? I've always wondered why this apparent dichotomy exists. I read quite a lot of lengthy texts, but they're often technical documents that exist on the internet. I hardly ever sit down in a quiet place with a book. Am I not a reader?
- tbomb 2y ago
  I have this conversation with my wife (who is an avid book reader) at least once per month. I read so many technical documents for work, via my computer, that I often don't want to read a book for pleasure.
  - ruthmarx 2y ago
    Reading technical docs is closer to reading shop names and street signs than it is to the intention to sit down and consume a work of art.
  - mingus88 2y ago
    I’m “reading” all day long. Code, chats, news, documentation. There’s really all the difference in the world if you can sit still and focus on a good engaging long-form work. I think most folk are losing the discipline to do that, as we all communicate in brief spurts of async messaging and anything published for mass consumption is written at a 4th grade level I try to read novels in chapter length segments. It’s hard to avoid to urge to context switch or get distracted
    - graemep 2y ago
      I agree that the big difference is between short and long form reading. i do not think this is discipline so much as inclination. I never had to discipline myself to read a book I enjoyed (whether fiction or non-fiction). Some books grip me so much it takes discipline to but the down. What this seems to show is that long form reading has significant effects on your brain, developing the ability to read long form. I am not clear on whether they have shown which way the causality runs: maybe having a brain adapted to long form reading just makes you more likely to do it. It could even run both ways?
65 2y ago
I always wondered if there's a link between handedness and reading comprehension. E.g. Left handers tend to use more of the right hemisphere for language processing. Does this mean reading ability is diminished? I myself struggle with reading and am left handed. It sort of feels like I'm forcing a muscle instead of using a muscle and strengthening it. I also have poor reading comprehension. I do read a lot but no matter how much more I read my comprehension and reading ability always stays the same. I also wonder if left-to-right languages are better suited for right handed people. Often my eyes will jump around the text in a way that feels like it'd be easier to read text right-to-left.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  There could be a link, but n=1 I'm left handed and read more/faster then all in my social circle (that I'm aware of).
- Arrath 2y ago
  I'm left handed myself and have always loved and excelled at reading (according to various tests or programs in school anyway), not that anecdata is much good but there it is
- lproven 2y ago
  > I myself struggle with reading and am left handed. I am a natural speedreader -- I never studied it -- and I have read accounts of several other natural speedreaders in this thread and agree with them. I'm left-handed too. I doubt there's any correlation, TBH.
pessimizer 2y ago
Also, people who learn to read very early end up weird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia I was hyperlexic, and I always found it very bizarre when people said they had a voice in their heads while they were reading (subvocalization.) I think I read so much as a very small child that I was exposed to much more written than spoken language, and I never needed subvocalization (or left it behind at some point.) After learning a second language with very different pronunciation rules, I realized that I was not only subvocalizing in that language, but was also now subvocalizing while reading English. It struck me when I was reading a book on the operations of the House of Commons, and I realized I was reading "clerk" as "clark." The word "clerk" is spelled identically and has exactly the same meaning in both American and British English, but I was distinguishing them because I was reading in a UK context. I actually wrote about it yesterday; using a database metaphor, I think I turned the natural primary key of the visual appearance of words into a composite key that now included the sound in order to distinguish between the meanings of very similar Romance language words from their English counterparts. I had to read in an accent. I'm considering blaming how impossibly hard it was for me to pick up a second language on the disability of not previously subvocalizing.
- graemep 2y ago
  Interesting, but I wonder about the causation implied by your first sentence. The article you link to seems to show a correlation, but surely a more likely explanation is that the same factors cause both early reading ability and autism.
- bsenftner 2y ago
  I have a younger sister that was hyperlexic. At age 5 we discovered she'd taught herself how to read French literature (it looked interesting) and she'd taught herself how to play piano, and was surprisingly good... She was whisked away to special schools, and I've never gotten to know her. She's as distant as a stranger.
btilly 2y ago
What about people who don't just read, but have absurd speed? My brother and I both read around 900 wpm. My children only read at a normal adult speed, but both love to read. If I had a way to have passed on my reading speed, I would have. But I have no idea how to do so. And no idea how my reading speed is possible. I've met only one person outside of my family with similar reading speed to my own.
- bogdan 2y ago
  Can you read technical text at that speed and understand it?
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    Another faster-than-average reader here, I don't remember what my result was when I calculated reading speed. Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed. When I'm reading fiction, I forget that I'm reading, and don't even know what speed I'm reading. I'm completely in the flow and the story is playing out in my head.
    - mtalantikite 2y ago
      > Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed. Do you also find that this happens with different types of fiction, or are they all basically the same? Personally, if I'm reading someone like Toni Morrison or Marquez, I find that I like to slow down and savor what's going on. It's like ready poetry. If it's something I can read fast, I tend to find it's not something I'm drawn to spending the time with.
      - Agingcoder 2y ago
        I’m the same - I slow down dramatically with technical topics unless I’m very comfortable with the material. There’s no pleasure in speed reading through literature. It’s like a gourmet meal - you don’t enjoy the food if you wolf it down in 10 minutes.
retskrad 2y ago
Speaking of reading, if we simulate a theoretical person (who hasn't read a book in their life and has poor reading comprehension and speed) and that person has the goal of reaching a 700 score on the SAT verbal, how many hundreds of hours of passive reading (opinion pieces, fiction, nonfiction) would the person need to develop the necessary reading speed and comprehension base before progressing to the next stage which is actively practicing SAT verbal questions?
- feoren 2y ago
  0 hours of "passive reading". If you want to get better at the SAT verbal, you should start practicing SAT verbal questions immediately. If I want to get better at the piano, how many hours of music should I passively listen to before I start practicing the piano? None: start right now.
  - abathur 2y ago
    I'm not sure this is quite what GP is fishing for. While I haven't taken a modern SAT test, I'm pretty sure the ~verbal score covers a fair amount of comprehension and ~usage that isn't as easy to cram/prep. Since the GP is setting aside vocabulary prep as a separate phase, I think they're specifically wondering about how to build up those more nebulous skills. (Is your hypothesis here that just running over a lot of these questions is sufficient to develop reading comprehension at a level necessary to handle novel questions at exam time? Is it that just reading enough of these questions will teach you the comprehension? Is it that these questions aren't a great proxy for comprehension in the first place and hence it's easier to game them than to develop comprehension? Some of these might tick the GP's boxes, but others probably won't. To get really to the point: one of the GP's concerns is reading speed, and I suspect it's going to be really hard to crack 700 under pressure if you're having trouble even reading all of the questions/answers in the allotted time.)
- underlipton 2y ago
  I don't know that the latter is even necessary, save to simply familiarize oneself with the format. A good verbal score probably just requires being rather an*l about grammar, logical argument, and the retention of information from the question passages and sentences. My 800 came well after I'd transitioned from filling my spare time with reading YA novels (Dune and Shogun would have been the top end of my experience, and I didn't even finish the latter) to filling it with sketching, and I believe that I took the test around the same time that I was copping Bs and Cs in English because I couldn't keep up with the class' pace on Huckleberry Finn. Lawyers in the family (and the many, many arguments with them) was probably my advantage.
amelius 2y ago
Does this brain difference somehow translate to other aspects of life than reading?
- anothertroll123 2y ago
  Exactly my question. As somebody who reads a book every two weeks... I wouldn't say I have a particularly "better" brain...
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lentil 2y ago
I struggle with reading speed, and concentration in general when reading. No idea why. However, I love listening to podcasts, audiobooks, videos etc. at 3x speed. Using text to speech has also helped. No longer do I delay reading long messages from coworkers, or dread reading boring documentation. I just use text to speech. It works really well on Windows (my current work laptop), but unfortunately not so much on Linux (personal laptop) or mobile (too fiddly).
mediumsmart 2y ago
I just realized that I immediately close a site when a popup comes - doesnt matter when that happens. Popup > cmd w done. I do this at an absurd speed so maybe evolumutation is in play
thunkingdeep 2y ago
Aren’t people who are good at anything in possession of different brains? I know a guy that plays chess around the 2000 level, but cannot read. I have a cousin who can memorize a deck of cards, in any order, in just a few minutes. Everybody has different talents, but who gets to decide which brains are worth understanding? We should be trying to combine and analyze all of the different ways that different brains have capacity for incredible feats of human accomplishment.
- neom 2y ago
  I couldn't agree with your last sentence more. I'm, I guess, "quite obviously neurodivergent" (so I'm told), I have all these comobribities, like apparently I'm brilliant and xyz, but literally cannot do these other things other humans can do (read at 0.25wph, but audio books can't go fast enough). We'd really be great at building "society teams" if we could figure this stuff out at a more philosophical AND scientific level.
- deleted 2y ago
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- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I dont think anyone is suggesting otherwise. The quest is to understand how brains work- full stop. This means what you said is true, as well as the exact inverse. There is interest in knowing why people cant do things. Why are some people face blind, suffer from amnesia, or incapable of complex thought. It all boils down to understanding a complex system.
  - neuralRiot 2y ago
    It’s something so complex and yet so simple, the brain is just an FPGA. it creates the wiring for a task and the more you do said task the more it optimizes it, perhaps the difference for some people is just the ability to create or optimize the connections in a faster or easier way.
    - neom 2y ago
cgh 2y ago
The article mentions brain plasticity, but I wonder how much of this is also genetic. Using myself as an example, I started reading novels relatively early, mostly skipping the entire YA genre. I clearly remember reading "Jaws", which is definitely not meant for children, when I was eight years old. Does precocious reading mean the left anterior part of the temporal lobe and the Heschl's gyrus are already larger/thicker to begin with in some people? Or do they develop rapidly in response to reading as a stimulus?
jimnotgym 2y ago
Is that because people who enjoy reading develop brains that are adapted to it?
neom 2y ago
I have pretty damn sever dyslexia and dyscalculia, I've followed the research over the years because of how very clearly "different" my brain is from the typical, my thinking style is all audio/visual (funny because spelling is linked to phonics yet I think heavily in voice). I've read everything from cortical thickness to neuroplasticity to processing regions, but I believe the best correlation they found so far is around the depth of mini columns (interestingly also associated with autism research).
- dijit 2y ago
  My father once referenced the “voice in your head” and I had to clearly articulate that I don’t hear a voice, and such insinuations are sort of weird. I see words, as if written gliding through my mind as I think my internal thoughts. My father didn’t believe me, and probably still doesn’t; but it is interesting to me how our brains can be so different as to not even be able to understand another persons easy to define alternative internal experiences. I also always wondered if we all perceive colours the same or if colours are different to us but we just give them the same words- since colour could, in theory, be completely subjective.
  - neom 2y ago
    Yah what you described is really interesting to me, when I'm "in thought" I am for sure looking at movies and pictures, but the idea of thinking that way is super weird, me typing this right now is basically just commanding my fingers to punch out the words the voice in my head is telling me to punch out, half the time I just close my eyes to do it because I'm jut touching typing anyway (I actually like to keep my eyes closed generally when thinking), reading it looking at the word, making my brain remember what the word sounds like, making the word sound using the voice in my mind, thinking about the voice in my mind, reading is VERY inefficient. On colour, my degree is in digital imaging technology and I have studied colour from the perspective of gamuts and profiles etc. Certainly we all experience colour differently. I suspect much like a real colour profile, there is approximation done between (real world light frequencies/real "colour") them and mixing them, it would make sense there is some compression and "fixing" in the "brain gamut" as well. Blue is between about 450 and 495 nanometers, never mind the neurology, the physiological difference between us alone to account for that, nature is magic but I'm not sure it's perfect? My totally unsintific just from hours of doing colour correction with various humans, is maybe a 1%ish difference in shade, and somthing about where in the colour range it falls also has a variance/tipping point (dress colour thing?) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space)
bsenftner 2y ago
I'm finding this extremely interesting. I'm a reading outlier, I have a stutter which makes it difficult to hold conversations with fast talkers, so I gave up trying during early elementary and started reading novels. I really got into reading, to the point by the end of 4th grade I'd read every single Nobel Literature winner at that time. By the end of middle school I was running out of authors I liked to read. Today, at age 60, I have pretty much finished reading every author I like, and of their better novels and essays I have read them dozens of times. The result of all this reading is I have, for lack of a better way to describe this to the HN audience, I have a gargantuan context. I can hold a huge amount of information in my head at once, and work with it dynamically. When I imagine a software issue, I see it as parallel implementations in my mind with variations between them, and as I evaluate the variations those that are not possible or no functionally better than the others disappear from the grid in my mind, and when there is only one left I start coding. However, I find explaining my software development process to others impossible. They say what I'm doing is not possible, or they say I'm lying. I think all this reading gave me an over developed sense of secondary consideration insight. I simply see further the implications of things, of how their combinations are going to affect one another. But as hard as I try, I cannot explain these insights in a convincing manner. It's like being aware a tower is going to collapse, I can tell people how it will happen, and they just deny it, and then it collapses. Sometimes I then get blamed for not insisting against their denials. Due to all this: I've become a student of effective communications. I'm continually trying to figure out how to explain to those that cannot see these combinations and implications of how in the future this thing is going to fail.
- dsclough 2y ago
  After all that reading, got any favorite books / authors you’d like to share? Curious to hear
  - bsenftner 2y ago
    My favorite book is Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (the Glass Bead Game), my favorite authors are tied at Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick, and the book that I've read the largest number of times is Clockwork Orange, the UK edition with the added chapter of Alex being a senior politician. I also have an antique copy of Grimm's Fairy Tails that is not the one that got widely published, an earlier version from that 1800's that would be banned today, and that is very interesting, I'd call it psycho-sexual horror. My mother is 88, was a child prodigy, and has quite the antique library. These days I read a lot of memoirs and biographies, not nearly as enjoyable.
TMWNN 2y ago
>I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia. —Woody Allen
- freedomben 2y ago
  Like all great humor, it's hilarious because it's true and points out an absurdity
Iwan-Zotow 2y ago
Tastier brains?
cbracketdash 2y ago
Reading is still the most efficient and quickest ways of obtaining a deep understanding of a subject. The emphasis on visual cues (namely movies and videos) in the new generations are quite alarming. I wouldn't be surprised if a partial reason why America ranks relatively low for standardized testing in younger children is the decline in reading
- anonzzzies 2y ago
  It is embarrassing how bad my younger colleagues are at reading; they have to have audio/video for everything and get it spoon fed otherwise they 'don't get it'. And it is fairly universal; what used to be managers and sales guys 'jumping on a call' is now everyone about everything.
nis0s 2y ago
I am left wondering if the differences in brain anatomy happen because these people read more and thus become good at reading, i.e., the brain is plastic, or these people have a proclivity to be better at reading because their brain is structured differently. Unless I missed it, there isn’t much mentioned on plasticity in the original paper.

158 points by pseudolus 2y ago

But what about someone like myself who is good at reading but doesn't get the same pleasure from it anymore and can no longer finish books?

imzadi 2y ago
I was wondering something similar from a different perspective. I love to read, but I'm actually terrible at it. My eyes don't track well and I jump lines constantly, get confused about where I am, and have to start whole pages over sometimes. My mind also wanders, and I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really been reading. It takes me twice as long to finish a book as it does my friends, but I still enjoy reading and love books.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really been reading. You're not alone there.
- mxuribe 2y ago
  Oh wow, i thought you were describing me for a moment there!
- feoren 2y ago
  > My mind also wanders, and I can go several pages before realizing I haven't really been reading. I think this is an under-rated benefit of reading. Would you feel like you failed if your mind wandered during a guided meditation? Can reading serve a similar function? This is one reason why I gave up trying to significantly increase my reading speed. Blazing through a nonfiction book at 700 WPM might make you feel like you've learned a lot, but you probably haven't really digested anything. Do you really want to uncritically ingest a nonfiction book? I've listened to enough episodes of If Books Could Kill (amazing podcast, btw) to no longer have any desire to quickly "absorb knowledge" from a book, with how likely it is that that "knowledge" is flawed in myriad ways. I now think it's much better to go slowly, ponder what you read, take time to let your mind wander (it's connecting the rest of your life to what you've just read), and be critical and questioning of everything you read. If a book isn't worth taking this time on, it's not worth reading. And for novels or reading for fun, why would you want to rush through it? It's for pleasure: go at whatever speed gives you the most pleasure. It's not a contest.
WalterBright 2y ago
Some years ago, I noticed that I read less and less, and it troubled me. Then one day I tried on a pair of reading glasses over my regular glasses. I was amazed. The trouble turned out to be it simply got harder and harder for me to read, and so I enjoyed it less, so read less. Getting progressive lenses fixed that.
- kbelder 2y ago
  My case exactly, except I'm still in denial.
- OJFord 2y ago
  Very similar with me - I've never been a huge reader (actually, I wonder in the opening stats how many are people like me humbly saying they 'don't read regularly' because although they absolutely do read a lot more than others it's not as much as they would like) but I noticed it was very fatiguing, I'd often barely read anything before I was yawning or closing/stretching my eyes, wanting to look away. Earlier this year I went to the opticians (it'd been a few years) and lo and behold I had a prescription for the first time. A very mild one, and I suspect it's the astigmatism that affects reading more, since it makes smaller fonts sort of 'fuzzy' around the edges, even though everything seems perfectly fine at that distance (or any other) without the direct comparison.
mandmandam 2y ago
Could this be a case of modern screen-based dopamine delivery systems affecting your attention span? From personal experience, I find it much easier to get absorbed reading books like I used to when I'm on a detox from the tyranny of the screen. It doesn't take long at all; a day or two and I start to feel some recovery. Taking even that much time away feels increasingly difficult... But like going to the gym, you rarely regret it afterwards.

erehweb 2y ago

Do we know if this difference is present at birth, or something that shows up as a result of doing more reading, like how the brains of London taxi drivers changed when they studied for the taxi-driving exam, which meant they had to memorize lots of routes.

citadel_melon 2y ago
I was thinking of the same example for this article. Nature vs nurture arguments often need much more evidence than many can provide.
- philipov 2y ago
  Nature vs Nurture arguments always suffer from a reductionism problem by assuming there's a dichotomy between the two, which owes its origin to a feeling of exceptionalism that separates anything Human from anything Natural. In fact, nurture is a subcategory of nature, and there is a complex intertwined relationship between genetic and cultural heredity. Trying to reduce it to a debate between one or the other will poison one's understanding before even getting started.
WalterBright 2y ago
I know that 4 years of college rewired my brain.
smeej 2y ago
The part where it talked about how the brain changes when people practice reading more made the title and first paragraphs seem like they have the causation exactly backward. It sounded like they were saying "people are good at reading because they have different brains," implying some sort of unfair advantage, rather than that people who read a lot develop different regions of their brains than people who don't. I'm surprised by the number of adults I've worked with who had graduate degrees and yet could not read a paragraph out loud on the spot and sound natural. I found out most of the reason I was having so much trouble communicating with them was because almost all our communication was in writing, and they couldn't read fluently. It's hard for me to imagine completing, like, 5th grade without being able to read well, so it's a testament to their fierce determination that they'd been working around that challenge at such high levels!

IAmGraydon 2y ago

When they were surveying readers vs non-readers, does the reading have to occur via books? Does reading text on the internet not count as reading? I've always wondered why this apparent dichotomy exists. I read quite a lot of lengthy texts, but they're often technical documents that exist on the internet. I hardly ever sit down in a quiet place with a book. Am I not a reader?

tbomb 2y ago
I have this conversation with my wife (who is an avid book reader) at least once per month. I read so many technical documents for work, via my computer, that I often don't want to read a book for pleasure.
- ruthmarx 2y ago
  Reading technical docs is closer to reading shop names and street signs than it is to the intention to sit down and consume a work of art.
- mingus88 2y ago
  I’m “reading” all day long. Code, chats, news, documentation. There’s really all the difference in the world if you can sit still and focus on a good engaging long-form work. I think most folk are losing the discipline to do that, as we all communicate in brief spurts of async messaging and anything published for mass consumption is written at a 4th grade level I try to read novels in chapter length segments. It’s hard to avoid to urge to context switch or get distracted
  - graemep 2y ago
    I agree that the big difference is between short and long form reading. i do not think this is discipline so much as inclination. I never had to discipline myself to read a book I enjoyed (whether fiction or non-fiction). Some books grip me so much it takes discipline to but the down. What this seems to show is that long form reading has significant effects on your brain, developing the ability to read long form. I am not clear on whether they have shown which way the causality runs: maybe having a brain adapted to long form reading just makes you more likely to do it. It could even run both ways?

65 2y ago

I always wondered if there's a link between handedness and reading comprehension. E.g. Left handers tend to use more of the right hemisphere for language processing. Does this mean reading ability is diminished? I myself struggle with reading and am left handed. It sort of feels like I'm forcing a muscle instead of using a muscle and strengthening it. I also have poor reading comprehension. I do read a lot but no matter how much more I read my comprehension and reading ability always stays the same. I also wonder if left-to-right languages are better suited for right handed people. Often my eyes will jump around the text in a way that feels like it'd be easier to read text right-to-left.

BenjiWiebe 2y ago
There could be a link, but n=1 I'm left handed and read more/faster then all in my social circle (that I'm aware of).
Arrath 2y ago
I'm left handed myself and have always loved and excelled at reading (according to various tests or programs in school anyway), not that anecdata is much good but there it is
lproven 2y ago
> I myself struggle with reading and am left handed. I am a natural speedreader -- I never studied it -- and I have read accounts of several other natural speedreaders in this thread and agree with them. I'm left-handed too. I doubt there's any correlation, TBH.

pessimizer 2y ago

Also, people who learn to read very early end up weird: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlexia I was hyperlexic, and I always found it very bizarre when people said they had a voice in their heads while they were reading (subvocalization.) I think I read so much as a very small child that I was exposed to much more written than spoken language, and I never needed subvocalization (or left it behind at some point.) After learning a second language with very different pronunciation rules, I realized that I was not only subvocalizing in that language, but was also now subvocalizing while reading English. It struck me when I was reading a book on the operations of the House of Commons, and I realized I was reading "clerk" as "clark." The word "clerk" is spelled identically and has exactly the same meaning in both American and British English, but I was distinguishing them because I was reading in a UK context. I actually wrote about it yesterday; using a database metaphor, I think I turned the natural primary key of the visual appearance of words into a composite key that now included the sound in order to distinguish between the meanings of very similar Romance language words from their English counterparts. I had to read in an accent. I'm considering blaming how impossibly hard it was for me to pick up a second language on the disability of not previously subvocalizing.

graemep 2y ago
Interesting, but I wonder about the causation implied by your first sentence. The article you link to seems to show a correlation, but surely a more likely explanation is that the same factors cause both early reading ability and autism.
bsenftner 2y ago
I have a younger sister that was hyperlexic. At age 5 we discovered she'd taught herself how to read French literature (it looked interesting) and she'd taught herself how to play piano, and was surprisingly good... She was whisked away to special schools, and I've never gotten to know her. She's as distant as a stranger.

btilly 2y ago

What about people who don't just read, but have absurd speed? My brother and I both read around 900 wpm. My children only read at a normal adult speed, but both love to read. If I had a way to have passed on my reading speed, I would have. But I have no idea how to do so. And no idea how my reading speed is possible. I've met only one person outside of my family with similar reading speed to my own.

bogdan 2y ago
Can you read technical text at that speed and understand it?
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  Another faster-than-average reader here, I don't remember what my result was when I calculated reading speed. Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed. When I'm reading fiction, I forget that I'm reading, and don't even know what speed I'm reading. I'm completely in the flow and the story is playing out in my head.
  - mtalantikite 2y ago
    > Anyways, I do slow down dramatically when it's technical. I'm learning then, and limited by my learning speed. Do you also find that this happens with different types of fiction, or are they all basically the same? Personally, if I'm reading someone like Toni Morrison or Marquez, I find that I like to slow down and savor what's going on. It's like ready poetry. If it's something I can read fast, I tend to find it's not something I'm drawn to spending the time with.
    - Agingcoder 2y ago
      I’m the same - I slow down dramatically with technical topics unless I’m very comfortable with the material. There’s no pleasure in speed reading through literature. It’s like a gourmet meal - you don’t enjoy the food if you wolf it down in 10 minutes.

retskrad 2y ago

Speaking of reading, if we simulate a theoretical person (who hasn't read a book in their life and has poor reading comprehension and speed) and that person has the goal of reaching a 700 score on the SAT verbal, how many hundreds of hours of passive reading (opinion pieces, fiction, nonfiction) would the person need to develop the necessary reading speed and comprehension base before progressing to the next stage which is actively practicing SAT verbal questions?

feoren 2y ago
0 hours of "passive reading". If you want to get better at the SAT verbal, you should start practicing SAT verbal questions immediately. If I want to get better at the piano, how many hours of music should I passively listen to before I start practicing the piano? None: start right now.
- abathur 2y ago
  I'm not sure this is quite what GP is fishing for. While I haven't taken a modern SAT test, I'm pretty sure the ~verbal score covers a fair amount of comprehension and ~usage that isn't as easy to cram/prep. Since the GP is setting aside vocabulary prep as a separate phase, I think they're specifically wondering about how to build up those more nebulous skills. (Is your hypothesis here that just running over a lot of these questions is sufficient to develop reading comprehension at a level necessary to handle novel questions at exam time? Is it that just reading enough of these questions will teach you the comprehension? Is it that these questions aren't a great proxy for comprehension in the first place and hence it's easier to game them than to develop comprehension? Some of these might tick the GP's boxes, but others probably won't. To get really to the point: one of the GP's concerns is reading speed, and I suspect it's going to be really hard to crack 700 under pressure if you're having trouble even reading all of the questions/answers in the allotted time.)
underlipton 2y ago
I don't know that the latter is even necessary, save to simply familiarize oneself with the format. A good verbal score probably just requires being rather an*l about grammar, logical argument, and the retention of information from the question passages and sentences. My 800 came well after I'd transitioned from filling my spare time with reading YA novels (Dune and Shogun would have been the top end of my experience, and I didn't even finish the latter) to filling it with sketching, and I believe that I took the test around the same time that I was copping Bs and Cs in English because I couldn't keep up with the class' pace on Huckleberry Finn. Lawyers in the family (and the many, many arguments with them) was probably my advantage.

amelius 2y ago

Does this brain difference somehow translate to other aspects of life than reading?

anothertroll123 2y ago
Exactly my question. As somebody who reads a book every two weeks... I wouldn't say I have a particularly "better" brain...

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lentil 2y ago

I struggle with reading speed, and concentration in general when reading. No idea why. However, I love listening to podcasts, audiobooks, videos etc. at 3x speed. Using text to speech has also helped. No longer do I delay reading long messages from coworkers, or dread reading boring documentation. I just use text to speech. It works really well on Windows (my current work laptop), but unfortunately not so much on Linux (personal laptop) or mobile (too fiddly).

mediumsmart 2y ago

I just realized that I immediately close a site when a popup comes - doesnt matter when that happens. Popup > cmd w done. I do this at an absurd speed so maybe evolumutation is in play

thunkingdeep 2y ago

Aren’t people who are good at anything in possession of different brains? I know a guy that plays chess around the 2000 level, but cannot read. I have a cousin who can memorize a deck of cards, in any order, in just a few minutes. Everybody has different talents, but who gets to decide which brains are worth understanding? We should be trying to combine and analyze all of the different ways that different brains have capacity for incredible feats of human accomplishment.

neom 2y ago
I couldn't agree with your last sentence more. I'm, I guess, "quite obviously neurodivergent" (so I'm told), I have all these comobribities, like apparently I'm brilliant and xyz, but literally cannot do these other things other humans can do (read at 0.25wph, but audio books can't go fast enough). We'd really be great at building "society teams" if we could figure this stuff out at a more philosophical AND scientific level.
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s1artibartfast 2y ago
I dont think anyone is suggesting otherwise. The quest is to understand how brains work- full stop. This means what you said is true, as well as the exact inverse. There is interest in knowing why people cant do things. Why are some people face blind, suffer from amnesia, or incapable of complex thought. It all boils down to understanding a complex system.
- neuralRiot 2y ago
  It’s something so complex and yet so simple, the brain is just an FPGA. it creates the wiring for a task and the more you do said task the more it optimizes it, perhaps the difference for some people is just the ability to create or optimize the connections in a faster or easier way.
  - neom 2y ago

cgh 2y ago

The article mentions brain plasticity, but I wonder how much of this is also genetic. Using myself as an example, I started reading novels relatively early, mostly skipping the entire YA genre. I clearly remember reading "Jaws", which is definitely not meant for children, when I was eight years old. Does precocious reading mean the left anterior part of the temporal lobe and the Heschl's gyrus are already larger/thicker to begin with in some people? Or do they develop rapidly in response to reading as a stimulus?

jimnotgym 2y ago

Is that because people who enjoy reading develop brains that are adapted to it?

neom 2y ago

I have pretty damn sever dyslexia and dyscalculia, I've followed the research over the years because of how very clearly "different" my brain is from the typical, my thinking style is all audio/visual (funny because spelling is linked to phonics yet I think heavily in voice). I've read everything from cortical thickness to neuroplasticity to processing regions, but I believe the best correlation they found so far is around the depth of mini columns (interestingly also associated with autism research).

dijit 2y ago
My father once referenced the “voice in your head” and I had to clearly articulate that I don’t hear a voice, and such insinuations are sort of weird. I see words, as if written gliding through my mind as I think my internal thoughts. My father didn’t believe me, and probably still doesn’t; but it is interesting to me how our brains can be so different as to not even be able to understand another persons easy to define alternative internal experiences. I also always wondered if we all perceive colours the same or if colours are different to us but we just give them the same words- since colour could, in theory, be completely subjective.
- neom 2y ago
  Yah what you described is really interesting to me, when I'm "in thought" I am for sure looking at movies and pictures, but the idea of thinking that way is super weird, me typing this right now is basically just commanding my fingers to punch out the words the voice in my head is telling me to punch out, half the time I just close my eyes to do it because I'm jut touching typing anyway (I actually like to keep my eyes closed generally when thinking), reading it looking at the word, making my brain remember what the word sounds like, making the word sound using the voice in my mind, thinking about the voice in my mind, reading is VERY inefficient. On colour, my degree is in digital imaging technology and I have studied colour from the perspective of gamuts and profiles etc. Certainly we all experience colour differently. I suspect much like a real colour profile, there is approximation done between (real world light frequencies/real "colour") them and mixing them, it would make sense there is some compression and "fixing" in the "brain gamut" as well. Blue is between about 450 and 495 nanometers, never mind the neurology, the physiological difference between us alone to account for that, nature is magic but I'm not sure it's perfect? My totally unsintific just from hours of doing colour correction with various humans, is maybe a 1%ish difference in shade, and somthing about where in the colour range it falls also has a variance/tipping point (dress colour thing?) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-gamut_RGB_color_space)

bsenftner 2y ago

I'm finding this extremely interesting. I'm a reading outlier, I have a stutter which makes it difficult to hold conversations with fast talkers, so I gave up trying during early elementary and started reading novels. I really got into reading, to the point by the end of 4th grade I'd read every single Nobel Literature winner at that time. By the end of middle school I was running out of authors I liked to read. Today, at age 60, I have pretty much finished reading every author I like, and of their better novels and essays I have read them dozens of times. The result of all this reading is I have, for lack of a better way to describe this to the HN audience, I have a gargantuan context. I can hold a huge amount of information in my head at once, and work with it dynamically. When I imagine a software issue, I see it as parallel implementations in my mind with variations between them, and as I evaluate the variations those that are not possible or no functionally better than the others disappear from the grid in my mind, and when there is only one left I start coding. However, I find explaining my software development process to others impossible. They say what I'm doing is not possible, or they say I'm lying. I think all this reading gave me an over developed sense of secondary consideration insight. I simply see further the implications of things, of how their combinations are going to affect one another. But as hard as I try, I cannot explain these insights in a convincing manner. It's like being aware a tower is going to collapse, I can tell people how it will happen, and they just deny it, and then it collapses. Sometimes I then get blamed for not insisting against their denials. Due to all this: I've become a student of effective communications. I'm continually trying to figure out how to explain to those that cannot see these combinations and implications of how in the future this thing is going to fail.

dsclough 2y ago
After all that reading, got any favorite books / authors you’d like to share? Curious to hear
- bsenftner 2y ago
  My favorite book is Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (the Glass Bead Game), my favorite authors are tied at Mark Twain and Philip K. Dick, and the book that I've read the largest number of times is Clockwork Orange, the UK edition with the added chapter of Alex being a senior politician. I also have an antique copy of Grimm's Fairy Tails that is not the one that got widely published, an earlier version from that 1800's that would be banned today, and that is very interesting, I'd call it psycho-sexual horror. My mother is 88, was a child prodigy, and has quite the antique library. These days I read a lot of memoirs and biographies, not nearly as enjoyable.

TMWNN 2y ago

>I took a course in speed reading, learning to read straight down the middle of the page, and I was able to go through War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Russia. —Woody Allen

freedomben 2y ago
Like all great humor, it's hilarious because it's true and points out an absurdity

Iwan-Zotow 2y ago

Tastier brains?

cbracketdash 2y ago

Reading is still the most efficient and quickest ways of obtaining a deep understanding of a subject. The emphasis on visual cues (namely movies and videos) in the new generations are quite alarming. I wouldn't be surprised if a partial reason why America ranks relatively low for standardized testing in younger children is the decline in reading

anonzzzies 2y ago
It is embarrassing how bad my younger colleagues are at reading; they have to have audio/video for everything and get it spoon fed otherwise they 'don't get it'. And it is fairly universal; what used to be managers and sales guys 'jumping on a call' is now everyone about everything.

nis0s 2y ago

I am left wondering if the differences in brain anatomy happen because these people read more and thus become good at reading, i.e., the brain is plastic, or these people have a proclivity to be better at reading because their brain is structured differently. Unless I missed it, there isn’t much mentioned on plasticity in the original paper.